


Nyssa's Daughter

by LectorEl



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Holocaust Imagery, Janet has so many issues, Nyssa Raatko - Freeform, Prostitution, trauma ahoy people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:50:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prolonged use of the Lazarus Pit can have side effects. One of Nyssa's daughters inherited them. <br/>The year is 1941, and Janet Gurenko wakes in a field of corpses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Janet looked down at the evidence of her pregnancy. “Just a little while longer,” she promised the child. The world was an ugly place, but she would make it better before he came into the world. One less vulture. Janet straightened the folds of her floor length, crushed velvet cloak, and nodded to her men. The priest was opening to Psalm 23. The one he loved so much. Janet’s lips pulled into a smile, no emotion underlying the act.

“Move,” she ordered. Her men moved, forcing open the church doors. The priest fell silent, voice dying away halfway through psalm 23:3. Janet walked the center aisle, enjoying the fearful hush.

“And ye, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” Janet finished for him, pulling back her hood to stare straight at the good Father. He went flat white. “For I have seen the devil’s face, and know it to be mankind.”

Janet turned, bowing mockingly to the assembled parish. “Hello, chickadees.” She lay a hand over her swollen abdomen, feeling the baby kick, little foot pressing out against the wall of her skin.

“Who are you?”

Janet’s smile sharpened. “The ghost of Christmas past. Isn’t that right, Father Anderson?”

The good Father was shaking like a leaf. “You- You-“

“Me.” Janet nodded. “Do any of these fine people know your history, Father?”

Anderson paled further. Janet pressed a hand to her breast. “My, my, Father. Keeping secrets, are we? Raise your hands, children, how many of you know Father Anderson was once a German soldier?”

Nobody moved. They barely blinked. Though that might have been the presence of Janet’s men, the barrels of their guns gleaming softly in the candlelight.

“None of you?” Janet tsk’d. “For shame. The story is so interesting. Isn’t it, Father? Rape, murder, betrayal, and a villain wholly without redeeming features.” Janet leaned back against the pulpit, hands resting atop the curve of her stomach. “Listen closely, children, there will be a quiz on this later. Our story starts in the nineteen forties, one bitter winter’s day…”

***

“Mommy!” Janet cried, reaching out for Nyssa. Soldiers tore her away, forcing Janet to the ground. “ _Mommy!_ ”

What happened after that- any woman could tell you what it means when a soldier tears open your bodice. But Janet was young. A girl barely on the cusp of womanhood, and she didn’t understand. The pain was incomprehensible, the sensation of foreign flesh invading her without context.

Her head dropped to the side, away from the faces of the men who crawled atop her, who touched and pinched and struck. Her eyes focused on a flask tossed carelessly aside by a soldier as he dropped his trousers. ‘Psalm 23:4’ was engraved on the surface. Psalm 23:4, her mind focused on. What was Psalm 23:4?

Just kill the bitch, Anderson, she heard one of the soldiers say, as if from far away. The flask was picked up, and Janet’s eyes followed it, to the hand and arm and face of a soldier. Blonde, blue-eyed, fair. Eyes nearly as blue as Janet’s own. She stared at him, holding his gaze. He drew his hand back, and struck her.

There was a gun in his other hand. Janet welcomed the bullet when it came. Janet’s thighs were sticky with drying fluids, her body battered by the soldiers’ cruelty. Death was a mercy.

One Janet was denied.

Janet opened her eyes to a nightmare. A cold, dead weight covered her, and blood soaked her clothes. Janet tried to scream. Corpses. All around her corpses. The bodies of her family. Here her little sister, skirts up around her waist and skin blue with death. Frost iced her lashes, morbid make-up like what their mother had denied them. There uncle Daniel, a red hole between his eyes. Over there aunts, uncles, cousins…

Janet shoved and struggled until she could roll the corpse atop her aside, and stood. The crux of her legs ached, and little flakes of red and white shed from her legs as she moved. Her shoes were gone, and the snow was so cold it burned. She raised a hand to her head. It came away bloody, little shards of white bone and soft gray pulp mixed in.

Janet began to sob then, hiccuping, fretful things, more from shock and confusion than any real comprehension of what had occurred. Eventually, her sobs died away, and she wiped her eyes with the hem of her bloody dress. She started walking, blindly, paying no attention to direction or landmark, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her.

Voices woke her.

Pretty bit under the grime, one said. Escape from one of the camps?

Nah, she’s too well fed. I’d have a go at her myself. You?

Why not? It’d be cheaper than paying a whore.

Janet stood.

If you want to fuck me, you’ll have to give me a ride into town, Janet heard herself say. I won’t have sex out here in the snow.

The men looked at Janet. Janet stared back. She couldn’t feel her feet. Couldn’t feel anything at all, except for the chill that gripped her heart.

Janet sat in the front passenger seat of a car, back ramrod straight.

Don’t turn on the heat, she ordered.

Why not?, a man asked

I have frostbite. Unfreezing the flesh and refreezing it in quick succession will damage it more than leaving it frozen, Janet said.

How’d you know that?

My uncle used to be a doctor, Janet said, eyes fixed on the horizon.

The man in the driver’s seat asked, what’s he now?

A corpse.

Janet got out of the car. She was alone with one of the men. She followed him into a room. Let him undress her. Let him fondle her prepubescent breasts. Lay on the bed, with her legs opened. Touched him the way he ordered her to touch. Moved as he ordered her to move. He came inside her. He slept.

Janet got out of the bed. She opened the man’s bag. Removed a roll of money, bullets, and a gun.

She lifted the gun. Loaded it. Shot the man as he slept.

The noise was very loud. Janet dropped the gun on the bed and went into the bathroom. She scrubbed her skin until it bleed. Got out of the shower.

The man’s coat was huge. It covered her. Janet put it on over her naked body. She put the roll of bills in one pocket, the gun in another, and walked out into the snow.


	2. Chapter 2

She walked for a long time after that, barefoot, nude beneath the coat, insensate. She walked until exhaustion forced her to her knees, and walked again when sleep relinquished it’s grip on her. She ate whatever she could find- trash from the bins, bark off of trees, dead things she found by the road.

She lived like that, like an animal, that first year after. It was a miracle, of the cruelest sort, that she never succumbed to illness or injury, and escaped being caught in the sweeps and being sent away to one of the camps, for vagrancy instead of Jewishness. She would have welcomed death.

It had turned from frozen winter to wet spring to blistering summer to chill autumn, and back again to the ice of winter, when she knelt to break the ice covering a puddle, and saw her face. Cheekbones protruded from a waxen face, lips cracked and bleeding, skin red and raw from the harshness of the wind. Her hair was a single tangled, filthy mass about her shoulders, and her eyes were fever-bright. She looked like a dead thing that had clawed it’s way from the grave.

She stared, and saw nothing of Janet Gurenko in that feral creature staring back. Had she even ever existed? Was there ever a time when she had been young and innocent? Janet doubted her own mind. It seemed impossible that the girl from before was the same creature crouched over a puddle like a stray dog.

For the second time since her waking nightmare had begun, Janet cried. This time in bitter comprehension of all that she had lost, and how far she had fallen. It was also the last. For the rest of her life, the tears would never come again. Ice encased her heart.

Janet Gurenko was dead. All that remained was this filthy, orphaned creature. Janet scrubbed her eyes with the back of her palm, and bit down on her lip until it bleed.

The pain was the clearest thing she’d felt since waking among corpses. She rose off her knees, and started, once more, to walk. This time with a purpose.

She wouldn’t die. For half a decade more, Janet would wander, friendless and alone. Those years would be a lesson, in how far her body could be pushed, and how desperate she could become. She would do terrible things, to survive. Vile things. Things that would have broken the good Jewish girl she’d once been. She turned eighteen in a back alley of Munich, skirt hiked up around her waist as a former Nazi party official fucked her.

She felt nothing. The ice around her heart had only grown thicker over the years. Her hate was cool and passionless, a distant force, that moved her without stirring her emotions. One that drove her to pull the gun from her coat-the same coat she had worn for six years now-and fire. She took the wallet off the corpse, smoothed down her skirt, and pulled the coat tighter around herself.

That night, she looked into the mirror of the filthy little room she rented, and saw that same familiar stranger. Her lips were scarred from being bitten open too many times, and she could see the starburst of scar tissue on the side of her head. The hair had grown in white over it, and it was cropped short enough her scalp could be seen. She was no beauty. She looked like a starving twelve year old, breasts small and ribs visible through her skin. Her eyes gleamed with the light of rage and madness.

“Another year,” Janet toasted herself, and swallowed down the night’s first shot of vodka. It wouldn’t be the last. She had been getting drunk on her birthdays since her fourteenth. Every time she woke up, it was a disappointment.

The vodka burned on its way down, and it was almost like feeling.

***

Time passed and Janet remained unchanged, as frozen as her heart. Eventually, the German soldiers patrolling the streets were replaced by Allied forces. The whole country began to shed the weight of the the third Reich. Janet did not care, and did not forgive. Her family was still dead. The removal of swastikas and dismantling of political offices could not make up for that sin.

Janet wanted revenge. If death wouldn’t take her, then it would take the people who had stolen her family and her innocence.

Janet kept working, and started planning. There was nothing left for her in Germany, just bad memories and bodies left unburied. It was not the hands that had acted she wanted to punish, but the minds that had conceived the act, had profited from it, and condoned it. The churches which had not condemned the deportations, the companies that had used slave labor from the camps, the organizations that had helped make it possible, by their actions, or their silence.

Janet wanted to ruin them. Send them plummeting into the ashes of all their ambitions. She would make them _crawl_.

She chose her target carefully. An older man, in his late twenties. American, a rising star within the military, and single. The American military hosted balls at their embassy, and dances for their soldiers. Janet made a new dress, and bought a pair of white cotton gloves and a supposedly fashionable hairpiece to cover the scars on her hands and the side of her head, and started going to the dances.

Her target enjoyed flirting, and witty conversation, and women who blush when he looked at them. Janet couldn’t blush, but she could flirt. She could be clever and engaging, and weave her web of lies.

She’s an orphan, she told him, working as an assistant to a shopkeeper. She didn’t do much during the war, just kept her head down and waited for it to be over.

By the third month of knowing her, he proposed. Janet almost felt bad. He was not a bad man. He didn’t deserve to be used like this. But she would have her revenge.

She said yes, and hugged him like it was everything she wanted. It almost was. She was going to America, and her plans were just beginning.


End file.
